The Bat-astrophe!

The news dropped last night that Ben Affleck was going to be suiting up and taking on the role of Batman in the upcoming sequel to Man of Steel and the interwebs promptly imploded and everybody lost their damn minds.   I'll be totally honest:  I wasn't expecting Affleck.  I'm not 100% sold but the more I think about this, the less I hate this idea. 

The biggest strike against Ben seems to be his role in 2005's Daredevil.  To be totally honest, I don't remember being a huge fan of that movie but I don't remember it being completely awful either.   And the genre of the comic book movie has evolved hugely in terms of quality- in writing, casting and directing- and let's be clear:  not a single frame of this movie has actually been shot yet.  There's no script.    The director, Zack Snyder managed to make Watchmen, a graphic novel that most considered to be unadaptable into a pretty good movie.   Christopher Goyer is, I guess, writing the script and he has screen credits on all the Dark Knight movies-  people need to take a breath.  This is not going to be anywhere near as bad as Batman and Robin.  (The benchmark for just how bad movies in the Batman franchise can be.  If somehow, this movie manages to be worse than Batman and Robin, I will be genuinely impressed.)

Yet, people are losing their damn minds over this:  a new petition on Change.org is demanding that Affleck be fired and some fools actually attempted to petition The White House to make it illegal for Affleck to star as Batman.  (Per HuffPost, it was taken down due to violatation of the White House petition systems terms of use.)  Really?   A petition?  Petitioning The White House?   Come on now.

This might be awesome.  (Screenrant.com seems to agree and has some cogent, coherent reasons as to why.)  And if it is awesome, Zack Snyder, Ben Affleck and company are going to be laughing- all the way to the bank.  My concern now is just how they're going to infuse 'The Dark Knight Returns' into this movie.  If you're going own any comic in graphic novel form, it should TDKR and Watchmen as well-  it's ready made for it's own movie adaptation and one hopes that Snyder will use that source material judiciously and with care.   But he pulled off Watchmen so I'm not too worried.

In the meantime, everyone needs to calm down.